Many US States Consider Abandoning Daylight Savings Time (newsweek.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A special Massachusetts commission recommends the state stop observing Daylight Savings TIme "if a majority of other northeast states, also possibly including New York, also do so." After a 9-to-1 vote, the head of the commission reported their conclusion after months of study: "There's no good reason why we're changing these clocks twice a year"... According to local reports, "The commission studied the pros and cons of the move and found, for example, retailers liked the idea of more daylight late in the day for shoppers... They also said there would be less crime, fewer traffic accidents and we would actually save energy."

A Maine state representative argues that it's actually harmful to observe Daylight Savings Time. "Some of those harms include an increased risk of stroke, more heart attacks, miscarriages for in vitro fertilization patients, among many other undesirable complications," reports Newsweek. Maine's legislature has already passed a bill approving an end to daylight savings time -- if Massachusetts and New Hampshire also end the practice, and if voters approve the change in a referendum.
At least six states are considering changing the time zones, according to Newsweek, and when it comes to Daylight Savings Time, the Maine representative told a reporter she had just one question.

"Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?"

Comments

It's"daylight saving"

[Spy Handler]

singular, not plural.

Also you don't need to capitalize each word. This is English, not German.

Think of it like this: during a melee you pick up a +5 magic sword and say, "It's ass kicking time!". Not "It's Ass Kickings Time!"

Re:It's"daylight saving"

[PolygamousRanchKid]

This is English, not German.

Noch nicht, aber wir arbeiten daran.

If you ask a linguistic, they will you that English is a butt ugly bastard mix of French and German anyway.

But English is amazingly effective in that everyone seems capable of using it. I sat in a company cafeteria in scenic Austin, Texas, and listened to how a colleague from China talked to a colleague from India . . . in an English that would have turned my 8th grade English teacher into a rampage. But hey, they could effectively communicate with each other. The wonders of English!

Capitalizing words in English seems to be a bit of a fad these days . . . we can't blame it on the "hipsters" any more since they are now history.

What are the current counter culture folks called . . . ?

Re:It's"daylight saving"

[Kjella]

If you ask a linguistic, they will you that English is a butt ugly bastard mix of French and German anyway. But English is amazingly effective in that everyone seems capable of using it.

Everyone is capable of using it just like they could butcher any language, but English is a PITA to learn properly because they've generally not only adopted the vocabulary but also other bits and pieces. For example say the following words: beak peak weak leak steak... whoops, the last one is completely different for no discernible reason because it's a loaner from old Norse. You were knighted but not fighted, you were fought. And you're ugly-uglier-ugliest but beautiful-more beautiful-most beautiful not beautiful(l?)er. It's no wonder that basic users end up with "me love you long time" English, a lot of it is simply rote memorization that this is the way things are. Same with vocabulary, a driver does driving and a plumber does plumbing but a person cooking food is a chef rather than a cook(er?). It's not that any pattern is more or less valid, but English got all of them mashed together.

This is incorrect

[maroberts]

What they're suggesting is actually remaining on "Summer" time all year round.

Re:This is incorrect

[mark-t]

That doesn't work well in higher latitudes, because then you end up with schoolchildren walking to school in the morning while it is still almost pitch black outside through most of December and January. The hour right before sunrise is often both the darkest and coldest period of the night.

Unless you propose that children start and finish school an hour later than they currently do, which could would be an even bigger clusterfuck than DST as tens of millions of adults, via a ripple effect, end up having to adjust their schedules to compensate, forcing them to work later as well, and negating the extra hour of daylight that they might otherwise have had in the evening.

"Standard" time year around makes the most sense. Noon, logically, is when the sun *should* be at its highest in the sky, but on DST, the sun is at that position at 1PM through the summer months.

Not quite

[sjames]

Several northern states are considering going from Eastern to Atlantic time, effectively springing ahead and never falling back.

Make the entire year DST

[execthis]

Most people don't like when DST ends, not when it is in effect. We don't like the loss of daylight in the evenings in Winter. It gets dark too quickly. People come come from work and it's already dark and they have no daylight time left to enjoy on their own.

So if DST is abandoned, then clocks should be permanently adjusted forward one hour. Of course that would never happen because standard time zones are offset from UTC.

So maybe the best solution would be to extend DST to cover the entire year.

Re:Make the entire year DST

[Powercntrl]

Most people don't like when DST ends, not when it is in effect.

You have to be a morning person to actually like DST. Fuck that. Anyone who enjoys being awake at the crack of dawn should just get up early of their own accord.

If you ask me, the biggest waste isn't daylight. It's all the road space, electrical generating capacity, and cell network bandwidth that goes unused every night, because there's a silly stigma against working the graveyard shift. Unless you work outside, it makes absolutely no difference whether the sun is shining over your place of employment. Convince half the population to be nocturnal and you've doubled the capacity of your roads, without paving a single new lane.

Re:Make the entire year DST

[swillden]

The actual day is 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds

It's blindingly obvious that this cannot be true. Think about it. Our clocks measure 24-hour days. If the solar day (the time between when the sun is directly overhead) were actually almost four minutes shorter than 24 hours, noon would shift by two hours every month. Sunrise and sunset would shift by even more.

The figure you mention is correct if you're judging completion of a day by watching far-distant stars (sidereal day). If you're judging it by looking at the sun, which is what's useful for human schedules, the mean length of a day is 24 hours and 0.002 seconds (solar day).

The difference is that the apparent motion of distant stars is caused only by the Earth's rotation. The apparent motion of the sun is caused by the Earth's rotation and the Earth's orbital motion about the sun. Because the orbit is elliptical, the length of a solar day actually changes throughout the course of the year. But the mean length is ever so slightly more than 24 hours

Compromise

[rossdee]

Advance the clocks half an hour next spring and then leave them there

Sigh

[DNS-and-BIND]

The whole point of DST in the first place is otherwise in winter the sun sets at 4:30pm. In the summer, it rises at 4:30am. This is fine for farmers, but for an urban population it's no good. I've lived in a region with no DST and it's silly, in summer the sun sets at 7:30pm. Totally wastes useful daylight. If you want to go back to this system so be it, but it's like there is no awareness of why it was adopted in the first place.

About the Only Good Thing...

[rally2xs]

...of not changing would be making drive-in movie theaters viable in the western part of each time zone. Otherwise, you get off work at maybe 5, drive an hour home or maybe more if you're in this screwed-up area of impossible traffic that is the DC area, and when NOT being exactly on the summer solstice, having just a few minutes to get the lawn mowed (hour and a quarter for the 1 acre here, or 45 minutes for the zero-turn mower I have now), and that's it. Not getting anything else done outside. Walk the dog? Do it in the dark. Have a cook-out? Dark. Rake the leaves? Dark.

Dark, dark, dark, dark, dark...

Pee on that. Keep DST, and make the day for something besides sitting in the office and writing code while wasting all the best part of the day for doing stuff outside, then getting home and going broke feeding batteries to the flashlight(s). We can tolerate non-DST in the winter 'cuz its too nippy to enjoy stuff outside anyway, but lets apply roundup to the weeds, spray for mosquitoes, work on our big radio antennas (K8DH here), and everything else outside in the daylight by keeping DST!!!

Re:About the Only Good Thing...

[EvilSS]

Some of the proposals are to stay forever on DST (essentially shift one time zone east) to maintain that daylight year round. Yes it means some dark mornings but it would also mean an end to driving home in the dark at 4:30pm in December for many northern states.

Re:Time

[sjames]

I was in the 2nd grade the year we did DST in January. Far from scary darkness, the kids loved it. It was an excuse to carry a flashlight to walk to the bus stop (pretty cool when you're 7 years old). I'm sure some parents FEARED for safety, but since we had flashlights, we couldn't have been that hard to see.

Re:You left off

[Calydor]

You sound like one of those "It doesn't happen to me" guys, which is great. You don't get a fucked up sleep schedule for several weeks? Wonderful. You don't get hungry an hour earlier/later than the clock says you ought to? Good for you. Obviously then no one does.

You didn't get in a car accident today? No one else did. Your house didn't burn down? No houses at all burned down. You didn't die? Worldwide immortality achieved!

Re:You left off

[Chrisq]

In the UK reports show that keeping GMT+1 all year round would reduce accidents, reduce burglaries, save on fuel, and be good for health. The counter argument is that some Scottish farmers on the western isles wouldn't see the sun come up while they milked their cows. (They are too stupid to think of getting up at an earlier time on the clock) Every year the farmers win.

Re:You left off

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would the cows care about what number a pointer on a clockface is pointing to? If they want to be milked an hour after dawn, the farmer milks them an hour after dawn.